'Spy-Hunter

Halo 2: Death Frags for Cuties

For once, Gabe isn't here to lie about me and my (supposed) cowardice. This is Patrick Joynt, Associate Console Editor here at GameSpy North, happy to report that the Halo 2 community is alive and well. A great group of players showed up for our session last Tuesday, a prelude to our epic Halo 3 beta coverage. Presuming that that darned Crackdown code issue resolves, we're looking forward to playing some of the beta tonight in a special session, followed by a return to business as usual with yet more Halo 3 next Wednesday, May 23! 7 p.m. Pacific, as always.

He chose... poorly.

Being the astute readers you are, the type of people who know where every sniper rifle and laser sword on a map might be hidden, I'm sure you noticed that there's no discussion of score yet. Well, unlike certainotherweeks, this time we were utterly annihilated. I think that's related to choice of game. Halo's multiplayer is timeless because it's a very, very pure event. Sheer gaming chutzpah, perfect reflexes and speed, and a nice chunk of item memorization and tactical knowledge are what make a Halo 2 champion, and Rocket Mode is what makes a happy group of editors after a solid hour and a half of getting thrashed by our readers. 'SpyHunter participants, I salute you: you utterly destroyed us last week.

Of course, I have to apologize, since the horrific issues many of us experienced downloading the "last hurrah" of map packs for Halo 2 resulted in a late start. Between the initial technical issues and the later issues of trying to purchase Xbox content on a 360, I can't say that I was particularly thrilled about integrating the new maps into my rotation. And remade classics or not, two bucks per map is sheer highway banditry.

Of course (again), if we're discussing downloading issues with Halo, then I have to mention the stunning impact of the franchise's closing chapter, Halo 3. After a morning of stonewalling, the Bungie and Microsoft teams finally started spilling something other than "we know there's a problem, we're working to fix it." But if you've already taken a day off of work to get a head start memorizing the demo's three maps so you can crush us even more grotesquely next week, well, too bad. Hope you had some love letters to write or exercises to do as a back-up plan, because as of this writing the demo still isn't available to the tens of thousands of people who bought Crackdown.